Maybe that’s what we’re doing wrong folks. When we SELL animals, we pay from out from own pockets instead of begging for money for food, vet bills and beds, etc. We BUY our own animals that we use for breeding and show instead of begging, hounding people for them or stealing them (under color of law or the Tammy Grimes way.
What I’ve found along the road the past several years is:
1 It’s ok to breed if you are doing it to help support your rescue when donations are slim.
2. It’s ok to ask people on CraigsList for puppies because you need the money more than the owner does. The owner obviously doesn’t know how to do it right if they are selling them for $100 when you can get $400 for them after they’ve been “rescued”.
3. If the owners are reluctant to turn them over to you for free, you tell all your buddies that you need help hounding them until they give you the puppies because they grow tired of the hounding.
4. If you see someone giving a dog away online or on CraigsList, you MUST hound them as well because, if they are giving it away, they obviously won’t take time to make sure it will have a good home and THEY will make sure it does and pocket some money with a good sob story in the process.
5. You beg for donations so that you can go “rescue” as many healthy dogs as possible from auctions so that they can be saved from going to yet another slave/breeding interment camp. You must get at least one or two who are in a bit rougher shape so that they can be the poster dogs for the reason you just brought back 12 or 15 or however many you could cram floor to ceiling in crates in the back of your van. You, then, show them crammed into the van while posting about what a savior you were able to be with the monetary help of all your faithful supporters. Then, of course, you must beg for more donations to take care of them until wonderful homes are found. Better yet, you can ask them to sponsor one for the price you plan to sell them for and then collect again when it’s sold.
6. You don’t have to guarantee health because they are “rescues” who are expected to have problems due to their former lives of torture.
7. You are ever on the lookout for a breeder you and your friends can trash and harass when legislative session nears so that you can get all their animals seized and given over to you and present padded bills for the cost of caring for those dogs, all the while asking for more donations, food, beds and new buildings to house them in and money for “vet work” for dogs who don’t need any because they were already up to date and vetted prior to getting them. If it means once in a while you have to take in a few who DID need some care, you can still ask for donations and then sadly post that most of them had to be put down but they are at least now in a better place. You have to vet a few of them so they can be used for poster dogs to convince the public you deserve credibility as saviors for the good work that you do.
8. You then go to court, even if the breeder signed ownership to YOU when the dogs were taken and you convince the judge that the former owner was responsible for the terrible shape the dogs were in (even those who were healthy at the time and allowed a quick turn around to sell at a high price because it was “rescued”) and the former owner who now has no income should be responsible to pay the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost you to take care of them for 30 days or however long you were able to stall the judgment.
9. You push to have pet stores banned from selling breeder animals with health guarantees but allowing shelter and rescue animals to be sold there who can’t be guaranteed because they were rescued.
10. You do everything possible to convince the public that shelters are so crowded that you have to kill dogs who have been there a while to make room for the new ones in need. You DON’T tell the public that you are importing from other states and and countries because a large number of shelters don’t have enough stock to fill orders for rescued animals. You also don’t tell the public how many diseases those street dogs bring with them from other states that your state didn’t have before or how many of those foreign street dogs bring diseases and parasites that were not in this country before.
If you want to prove to legislators that this is happening, then you need to save screen shots of their brags, articles, posts they make on facebook asking to buy pups, brags and planning on social media pages and whatever else you can find. Those who are able need to put together graphs, poster, whatever to show how HSUS and SPCA and APHIS are linked together like the one that showed HSUS and its ties to ALF, PETA, ASPCA, terrorists like Rodney Coronado, etc. By the time many of those posts and CraigLists beg fests are posted on pet-law, they are gone with no hope of getting screen shots of them. Save first and THEN post and share the shots with those who ask.
Nancy G.